Tracking the sun’s movement

[An OtherParticipant @another21905]

Steve,

You mentioned a possible source to calculate sun position (Planetarium) in your original post, and said you thought it was for Windows, so not much use to you – I know the Raspberry Pi uses Linux, and there is a very good astronomic program available in Linux, Windows and Mac, called 'Stellarium' (**LINK**).. I am not sure if you can access its results from another application, as it would appear that you want to do, but it might be worth a look.

[frank brownParticipant @frankbrown22225]

I have had another idea ( ) , how about a MPPT controller for the solar cell position. A MPPT controller is yer average switch mode DC- DC converter, but it adjusts the output for maximum power, so it matches the output of a solar array (8 -33V?) to put maximum power into a 24V battery.

So you measure the output voltage and twiddle the array a bit , if the voltage rises, you twiddle it a bit more, if it falls you twiddle it a bit the other way. All done in software. Still needs the midnight reset. But if your are clever, you know that maximum output will be about midday, just run a 12 hour software timer from this point.

Frank

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Steve,

This NOAA page has Excel and Open Office spreadsheets that calculate solar positions. I was able to convert the formulae they use into Python fairly easily: unfortunately the resulting program is rather too big to post here.

By the way I can recommend Python. It's much more capable than BBC-BASIC!

Another particularly useful language is 'C. It's used by the various Arduino microcontrollers and one of them might be well suited to your requirement. They are cheaper and easier to interface than the sort of computer that's man enough to run Python. There's nothing in the solar position calculations that couldn't be done on an Arduino in C.

On the other hand you may have better things to do than learning another computer language!

Good luck with your project and apologies if I've been teaching granny to suck eggs.

Dave

[Steve PaveyParticipant @stevepavey65865]

Thanks for the links above – I have already seen the site that Martin has linked to and will probably use that method for the calculations. I haven't seen the NOAA page before – it will be useful for checking my calculations.

I have come across another similar project at **LINK** also using Python (it also uses Italian, and I really don't want to learn another language). He has made much, maybe all, of his code public.

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